The Female Athlete and Spectacle in Bollywood: Reading Mary Kom and Dangal

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For commercial re- use or republication permission, please contact [email protected] 68 | The Female Athlete and Spectacle in Bollywood… The Female Athlete and Spectacle in Bollywood: Reading Mary Kom and Dangal Shweta Sharma Abstract: This paper engages with the representation of the female athlete in Indian cinema. Specific references will be made to the cinematic portrayal of female boxers and wrestlers in Bollywood to argue that female boxers and wrestlers are portrayed as ‘masculine’. However, the sportswoman’s assertion of her femininity in a space exclusively occupied by men leads to ‘gender trouble’. To enunciate this argument two biopics, Mary Kom (2014) and Dangal (2016), will be analyzed. It would be observed that when a female boxer/wrestler tries to reinforce her identity, she is either subjected to criticism or faces failure. However, the argument that sportswomen are termed as ‘masculine’ does not necessarily imply that female athletes aren’t objects of the male gaze. The explicit sexual undertones which underline the spectacle of a female athlete competing with a male athlete reinforces gender lines instead of challenging them. Key Words: Sportswoman, Gender, Body, Masculine, Feminine, Gender Trouble, Boxing, Wrestling, Spectacle. *** Bollywood has produced only a few sports movies before 2010 and most of them like Lagaan (2001), Iqbal (2005), Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal (2007), expect Chak De! India (2007), are male-centric films. Until recently, Bollywood hardly depicted females as competitors in sports. It has been a recent development that female athletes have become subjects in Bollywood films like Mary Kom (2014) and Dangal (2016). However, what is problematic about these two biopics is that they create a narrative about sportswomen which undermines a woman’s agency and reinforces the ‘male gaze’ even when women have become active agents in sports at international levels. Before analyzing the representation of female athletes in the Indian cinema it is crucial to mention the history of women’s participation in sports in the public domain. Male dominance of sports in the Olympics until the 1960s was a reflection of the limited role of women in the public sphere. However, there was a surge of women’s participation in the 1970s in tandem with the rising women’s movement in the west. Title IX1 in the U.S. paved way for equality in educational opportunities for women, and as the World War II witnessed women as active agents in the economy, a new female athleticism was witnessed in the public sphere. It was a result of a challenge posed to ideological binary categories of the feminine and the masculine. Thus, the arena of sports which was earlier considered as ‘masculine’, requiring physical strength and prowess, also witnessed a steady participation by females (Messner 1988). Boxing and wrestling were sports which did not include female participants in the Olympics until wrestling was included as a women’s sports in 2004 and boxing in 2012. When female boxing was included in the Olympics, guardians of patriarchy spoke against the inclusion of women. Amir Khan, a boxer from Britain, explains the reason why he thinks women should not wrestle: "Deep down I think women shouldn't fight. When you get hit it can be very painful. Women can get knocked out." Khan’s statement exposes the belief that boxing as a strenuous sport is unsuitable for women as bearing pain is an ability associated with men. Women are considered too sensitive to bear the exertion which boxing demands. As Katherine Linder points out, boxing has always been a bastion of masculinity. The reason being that the aggression, violence and the physical Lapis Lazuli: An International Literary Journal 69 ISSN 2249-4529 AUTUMN 2019 prowess, which boxing demands, has always been the defining features of masculinity. However, this is not the only reason why boxing is considered an unsuitable sport for women. In her book, On Boxing, Oats draws attention to a much more covert reason for boxing being an exclusive sport for men, with its history going back to the gladiators in Rome. She observes that boxing attracted its audience by being a spectacle which brought forth the primitive instincts of man to kill and where pain led to pleasure. Thus, the female boxer held a subversive potential in a society where the binary of the masculine and the feminine not just limited the scope of a woman by limiting her domain to the home but also upheld her as an object of sexual desire and a machine for procreation. Since any activity which makes the female an objects of destruction or pain is considered subversive in the society. The boxing ring, thus, is a metaphor for life where boxers fight for survival. The history of boxing reveals that boxing became a way to earn a living for men in need of money and slave fight in America was not an uncommon way for entertainment. Roland Barthes calls sport a spectacle, and like theatre where everyone from the performers to the audience plays some part. However, boxing is not just a spectacle, but the manifestation of the corporeality of man and how life is a struggle while people act as observers (Oats). This leads to the implication that boxing was not only about whether women had the strength to fight in the ring but also a spectacle of life and death. From being a metaphor for life, the image of a female boxer and wrestler was repulsive to a society where a woman’s essential qualities were considered to be the ability to love and nurture. This essentialism was at heart of Khan’s argument, that made women unfit for fighting. This is why boxing as a game remained an exclusive sport for men for a long time though many women boxers like the Gordon sisters, the Bennet sisters, Louise Andler, Annie Newton, Laila Ali, and Mary Kom have proved that women could be worthy opponents. However, as Judith Butler has argued in Gender Trouble that the qualities attributed to a particular gender vary according to time and place. Butler further mentions that the idea of ‘woman’ and ‘man’ is a construct. Being a woman is nothing more than performing the role females are ascribed in soceity, or qualities that are deemed as feminine. Indian society, which views female boxers and wrestlers in similar light, has only recently started acknowledging the presence of women competitors in boxing and wrestling. Since cinema plays a dominant role in shaping public imagination, the portrayal of the life and struggles of Mary Kom and the Phogat sisters, are making their presence felt in all public domain. However, women opting for such sports still face a challenge because discourses of femininity and masculinity govern the domain of sports. These discourses still form a dominant strain in the way female athletes are viewed by people at large. This is also reflected in the cinematic representation of the Mary Kom and Geeta Phogat. Mary Kom, is based on the eponymous wrestler, a five-time World Amateur Boxing champion and a Bronze medalist in the flyweight (51 kg) category at the 2012 Summer Olympic. Dangal, on the other hand, is based on the career of the Phogat sisters who hail from Haryana. Geeta Phogat, freestyle wrestler won the first gold medal for India in wrestling at the Commonwealth Games in 2010 and Babita Kumari Phogat, was the winner of the gold medal at the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Both the films take great narrative liberties with the storyline for the sole purpose of producing dramatic effect. The sequence where the women in the two films compete against men is the instance where gender ideologies are simultaneously broken and reinforced. It also fulfils the voyeuristic desire of the spectators/viewers by offering a voyeuristic pleasure from a fight of the two sexes. An analysis of the two films will further illuminate this fact. Thus, though the film comes at a time when the ideology of gender norms in the Indian society are being tested and subverted, the films fall short of this agenda. Both films try to portray that masculinity and femininity are exclusive 70 | The Female Athlete and Spectacle in Bollywood… domains and any figure who occupies an ambiguous position on the gender spectrum is termed as a deviation. The markers of identity (femininity or masculinity) are based on gender and these markers are arbitrarily assigned to specific categories of gender. Gender is thus, an unstable category because it is an improvised performance. As Judith Butler points out, society identifies certain actions as feminine and masculine, which are then reflected in sports in their exaggerated versions. the life of gender norms cannot persist without the various approximations of those norms that constitute the bodily performances of everyday life, not to mention the idealized versions of those performances that we find in the athletic domain. Indeed, such ideals are also transformed in subtle and significant ways in and through their public and dramatic performances. However, women’s participation in sports, particularly those which are identified as exclusively masculine have led to the subversion and problematizing of these markers of gender.

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